Joan

For Little Rock Public Radio, this is Dan Boice, with Naming Arkansas.
Arkansas’s Highway Commission has long been famous for its political clout, as the Clark County residents of Joan can attest.
In the 1950s, the Road Commission began the project of paving Highway 51 in Clark and Hot Spring Counties. After the asphalt was laid down, the road crews put up new city limit signs, and the residents of Bethlehem were astonished to discover that their town was now named Joan. This was a puzzle, for nobody in Bethlehem knew who Joan might be. The best guess is that someone in the sign department simply made a mistake. In any event, the residents of the newly named town decided to just go along with the name change, which they did, and the town is still Joan. Not so the residents of Brown Springs which, when confronted by signs that proclaimed their town’s new name was Faber, made enough of a racket that the signs were removed and new signs with the old name of Brown Springs were installed, proving that, apparently, sometimes you really can fight city hall!
For the University of Arkansas at Monticello this is Dan Boice.